Madam Of The House. Donna Birdsell

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СКАЧАТЬ bulk shifting beneath his wife’s glare. Or what would have been a glare, had recent Botox treatments not made all forms of facial expression temporarily impossible.

      “Come on, Marcia. Work it,” Cecilia whispered. And then she closed her eyes and prayed again.

      Wow. Twice in one day.

      God wasn’t going to know what to do with herself.

      JAKE MET CECILIA at the reception desk, looking like he just stepped off the pages of a Neiman Marcus mailer in a moss-green sport jacket and gold striped tie. With his dark hair and money-green eyes, he drew slavering looks from every female in the office—and a few men, too.

      Jake walked Cecilia back to her office. “So?”

      Cecilia plunked her bag down on her desk and collapsed into the leather executive chair. “They passed.”

      Jake shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

      “Me, too. They’re the only ones who’ve even looked at the place in three months.”

      Jake came up behind her and kneaded the knots in her shoulders with the strong, gentle touch of one who had worked his way through college as a masseur. “I have faith in you. If you can’t sell that house, nobody can.”

      Cecilia sighed and closed her eyes, ignoring the butterflies in her stomach that sprang to life whenever Jake touched her. He was her assistant, for crying out loud. Her very young, very impressionable assistant. And she was, if not actually at least technically, still married.

      But Jake had a knack for making her feel good.

      Beneath his buttoned-down good looks beat the heart of a true flower child. His meditation/yoga/karma kind of attitude infused an air of calm into her hectic life and gave her momentary glimpses of what life might be like if she weren’t so driven.

      And although his eternal optimism drove her crazy, he made up for it by being so much fun to look at.

      Jake ended the massage, letting his hands linger a bit too long on her shoulders. Or was that just her imagination?

      Or maybe a little wishful thinking? Her mind whispered.

      Oh, boy. She was sinning again, wasn’t she?

      She raised her eyes heavenward. “Sorry!”

      “Sorry for what?” Jake asked.

      “Not you. Never mind.” She scooted her chair up to her desk and shuffled some papers around. “Any other calls while I was out?”

      “I don’t know what’s on your voice mail, but I only got one. Some woman named Dannie. I left the slip on your desk.”

      “Dannie?” Cecilia dug through the piles on her desk. It had to be Dannie Peters—now Dannie Treat—her best friend from high school. Or one of them, anyway.

      She and Dannie, Grace Poleiski and Roseanna Richardson had all run around together. They’d been inseparable, cutting classes, smoking in the girls’ room and doing each others’ nails in study hall.

      She retrieved the pink message slip and checked the number. Yep, it was her. She picked up the phone and punched in Dannie’s number with the eraser end of a pencil.

      “Hello?” As it always did, Dannie’s familiar voice sucked Cecilia directly back to 1984, when her legs were skinny and her hair was big, and her main concern was whether or not she’d let her current boyfriend get to second at the movies on Friday night.

      “Hey, Dannie.”

      “Cecilia!”

      “What’s up? I haven’t heard from you in while. You doing okay?”

      Cecilia heard shrieking in the background, and then Dannie’s muffled voice. “Richard Andrew Treat. Get the Tinkertoy out of your sister’s nose right now. And don’t give me that look.” Heavy sigh into the phone. “Sorry. Boys.”

      “Say no more.” Cecilia’s own son was pretty mellow, but she remembered how her brothers could have brought a Marine drill sergeant to tears when they were kids. “What’s going on?”

      “We’re having a last-minute girls’ night out,” Dannie said. “I talked to Roseanna yesterday, and we both agreed we could use a little fun. How about you?”

      “Count me in. Where?”

      “Philly. A bar in Center City called Caligula. They have an eighties night there that’s supposed to be a riot.”

      “Sounds great. What time?”

      “How about eight-thirty? We’ll get a jump on the young’uns.”

      “Remember when our nights out didn’t even start until eleven?”

      “Oh, yeah. I remember.”

      Cecilia heard an awful screeching noise on the other end, then Dannie yelling, “Richard! Matchbox cars do not belong in the garbage disposal!” Dannie came back on the line, breathless. “Cecilia, I have to run. But I’ll see you tonight?”

      “Absolutely.”

      Cecilia placed the phone in the cradle and smiled. It would be great to see her old friends again. Especially Dannie, who’d been going through a rough time lately.

      Her husband had died suddenly eight months before, on a business trip off the coast of Mexico, leaving Dannie with four kids under the age of six.

      Cecilia sighed. Life hadn’t gone the way either of them had imagined it would when they were filling out their M.A.S.H. books and conferring with their Magic 8 Balls in study hall.

      CHAPTER 2

      Not every property is a winner. The outside might be mint, but the inside could look like crap in a blender.

      Monty could have been talking about Ben. Mint on the outside, crap in a blender on the inside.

      It was still strange, though, after four months, to come home and not see him sitting in sweatpants and a T-shirt at the computer. He’d be watching a stock ticker scroll across the bottom of the screen, the blue-gray light illuminating the dark stubble on his chin, Coke cans and junk-food wrappers littering the floor around him.

      There had never been a “Hi, honey. How was your day?” Or, “You look exhausted. Should I cook dinner?”

      Maybe a “Banco de Chile is down two points, but it’s going to rally. I can feel it.” Or “I just bought five hundred shares of Sara Lee at rock bottom.”

      In reality, Ben’s self-proclaimed skill at predicting stock performance sucked. Big time. Before Cecilia had discovered that, though, he’d managed to lose more than sixty thousand dollars of their joint savings day-trading on the Internet.

      She kicked her shoes off near the door and pressed the button on the answering machine sitting on the hall table.

      “Ms. Katz. This is Melvin Weber СКАЧАТЬ